Mirafiori’s Restart Exposes the Blind Spot in Europe’s Industrial Policy

On 24 August, the assembly lines at Mirafiori — Fiat’s historic plant in Turin — restarted after a 31-day summer stoppage. The Fiat 500 Hybrid is once again being built on two shifts, with Saturday working planned for September and October. For a factory that has spent years lurching between reduced hours, furloughs, and promises of revival, the reopening is welcome news.

Yet the figures surrounding that restart reveal the depth of the decline. According to data presented by Turin’s metalworkers’ union, the city’s metalworking sector has lost 34,000 jobs over the past 15 years, while recourse to state-supported furlough reached 44 million hours in 2025, almost three times the 2023 level. Across Italy, passenger-car production fell from more than 1.4 million units in 2000 to fewer than 238,000 in 2025.

But the reopening is also a warning for Europe. Restarting a production line is not the same as rebuilding the social world that once grew up around it. As Brussels searches for a way to protect its car industry through the electric transition, the debate is dominated by competitiveness, emissions targets, and competition from China. But the usual scorecard — vehicles produced, factories retained, and jobs announced — overlooks another consequence of industrial decline: the erosion of the shared rhythms and institutions that allow people to recognise private insecurity as a collective problem.

Mirafiori makes this blind spot visible. The plant once employed around 60,000 workers and produced as many as one million cars a year. It did more than provide pay packets: it synchronised daily life. Shift changes filled the streets at predictable hours. Work set different biographies against a common background and gave conflict, solidarity, and political organisation a location.

The factory is still there. Its immense wall continues to define the neighbourhood, and production never entirely disappeared. What has vanished is the density and continuity of industrial life around it.

The Wall Remains but the Rhythm Is Gone

Between 2020 and 2025, I spent extended periods in Mirafiori’s bars, streets, gardens, and public spaces, speaking with residents and following everyday life around the factory. At eight in the morning, small groups of men still gathered near the factory wall. They smoked, watched the cars pass, and discussed politics, football, or local news. The conversations were continuous but rarely cumulative. When talk approached someone’s employment situation, it often stopped or moved swiftly to another subject.

One former metalworker told me he avoided places where he might run into acquaintances, because they would ask what he did for a living. He had not withdrawn from public space: he still went to bars and walked through the neighbourhood. What he avoided was biographical exposure. Without a stable occupational identity, an ordinary encounter could turn into a demand for explanation.

This is one of deindustrialisation’s quieter political effects. People can continue to share the same streets and experience the same insecurity without being able to treat that insecurity as common. Precarious work, unemployment, and reduced hours are structural conditions, but they are increasingly  experienced — and often concealed — as individual problems.

In my field notes, I summarised another resident’s description of Mirafiori as "a mass that never meets". People recognised one another and occupied the same places at the same hours, yet this familiarity did not create durable relationships or common expectations. They were isolated while remaining visible to one another.

Along the factory wall, a retired Fiat worker recalled banners, demonstrations, and years spent beside the same people. Working side by side had once produced common responses; now, he said, people struggled merely for the chance to become precarious workers. The wall preserves the memory of entrances, exits, and shifts, but it no longer organises the neighbourhood around a common rhythm.

This is why the latest restart cannot by itself reverse deindustrialisation. Stellantis originally said the 500 Hybrid could add more than 100,000 vehicles a year at full capacity. Yet the most optimistic union estimate now puts Mirafiori’s total output at only 55,000 to 60,000 vehicles by the end of 2026, and repeated interruptions have continued. A plant can produce more cars while still failing to provide the continuity from which a social world is built.

Recovery Must Be Judged Beyond the Factory Gate

The distinction matters well beyond Turin. The European Commission’s automotive action plan promises support for innovation, cleaner mobility, resilient supply chains, and workers’ skills. Yet the social side of industrial policy is still too often treated as an adjustment problem: retrain workers, match them to new vacancies, and compensate those who lose out. That approach assumes the transition succeeds if individuals move from one job category to another.

A genuinely just transition needs a broader test. Can workers plan next month’s income, a mortgage, or a family life? Is training organised collectively and tied to a credible job, or left to isolated individuals? Do the surrounding neighbourhoods retain unions, civic institutions, and ordinary meeting places where parallel experiences can become public concerns?

These are not sentimental extras. They shape whether economic change produces democratic agency or political resentment. EU and national support for carmakers should therefore come with social conditions that measure more than headline employment. Public authorities should track the stability of hours and incomes, reliance on prolonged furlough, the quality of new contracts, and the continuity of local suppliers. A job that exists on paper but repeatedly disappears from the weekly schedule cannot carry the same weight as stable employment.

Industrial funding should also extend beyond the factory gate. Training should be delivered to cohorts, with time and income protected. Municipalities and worker organisations should have a formal role in transition plans. And regions hosting strategic plants should receive support for civic spaces and services that allow people to meet without every encounter becoming a test of personal success.

This is not nostalgia for an industrial past that was often exhausting, dangerous, and hierarchical. The old factory produced domination as well as solidarity, and no community should depend on a single employer for its identity. The point is that economic institutions organise social time. When that time fragments, people lose more than wages; they lose some of the practical means by which a "we" can be formed.

The men outside Mirafiori’s bars have no shortage of things in common. Many have lived through the same decline in stable work and the same uncertainty about the future. What is missing is not proximity but a setting in which those experiences can accumulate rather than dissolve when the conversation changes.

Mirafiori’s restarted line deserves cautious hope. It may preserve skills, incomes, and a historic centre of European manufacturing. But Brussels should judge recovery by what happens outside the gates as well as on the production line. A factory has not truly returned when the machines restart. It has returned when stable time, shared expectations, and the possibility of common action begin to return with it.